Laurie Anderson is best known as one of the world's premier performance artists, but that tag is essentially one of convenience. Though she comes out of the avant-garde, she's far from inaccessible. It's just that she's hard to pin down: She's a composer, a filmmaker, a visual artist and a continually groundbreaking musician, using technology in new ways to enhance her voice and violin, and creating elaborate multimedia performance pieces such as 1983's "United States" or 1999's "Songs and Stories From Moby Dick."

She just finished a stint as NASA's first artist-in-residence, and she wrote the entry on New York City, her longtime home base, for the Encyclopedia Britannica.

But at heart Anderson is a storyteller, and in her trilogy of solo works, beginning with 2002's "Happiness," she has pared down the technological trappings to focus on words and ideas. Playful, elliptical, poetic, maybe a little coy, she raises many of the Big Questions and offers few answers.

Nestled amid less highfalutin stuff such as stories about her dog, the question posed by her latest work, "The End of the Moon," is "Who taught you what beauty is?"

"I was talking to some NASA people," Anderson says, "and they were reminding me that Einstein had rejected a number of his theories because he considered them ugly. Wait a second. What is he basing this on? Ugly?

"So this question of 'who taught you what beauty is?' is how this evening begins. And there are lots and lots of answers to that -- and obviously no real answer because we all answer that in our own way, fortunately."

Seldom has people's subjectivity been quite so visible as in the weeks leading up to last week's presidential election, when Anderson's tour happened to take her through all the heavily contested states.

"It's a very interesting look at the country at the moment," she says on the phone from a stop in Richmond, Va. "I know what they're saying about polarized. What a battleground this place is! There's a lot of arguing going on."

Unlike many artists, Anderson says she's leery of using her show as an opportunity to put a political point across.

"I don't think works of art are a very efficient way to convince anybody of anything, particularly in a political realm," she says. "I just don't. I think it's really dangerous to use notes, beautiful words and stuff like that -- it's kind of unfair, and also approaches propaganda. You're defenseless against this kind of stuff. I think art has enormous power, and I deeply resent it when people tell me what to do and what to think. I just can't bear it. So I try extremely hard not to do that in my own work."

Even if you're not handing out answers, just asking the questions is provocative. Getting people to think can be more volatile than telling them what to think, and Anderson is well aware of the tension this creates.

"In this particular work because of its nature, because it looks at NASA and there are stories about the way fear is used, the way war happens, the way war is pursued -- even though I'm treading pretty light, I think that it was perceived as pretty heavy," she says of the previous night's show in Virginia.

"Everybody's wound a bit tight right now, so things like this strike them differently than they would at another time. It's a very tense time in this country, and most people I talk to really feel there's a lot, a lot, a lot at stake. So I try to appreciate the fact that there's suffering on all sides."

The political debate feeds back into her own work because it relates to her essential question about people's aesthetic standards. "The work that I'm doing is somewhat about how stories are told," she says.

"It's such a wild moment to be doing this because what everyone's doing is kind of analyzing stories: Do I believe this guy or do I believe that guy? On what grounds?"

Anderson asks the same questions of her own work -- what her criteria are for what works and what doesn't -- and at NASA she found that scientists were doing the same.

"Anyone who's making anything has a theoretical idea of what they think they're going for, and then they try to be open to what's around them, and you find the tension between those. So in a lot of ways this work ended up being about a very uneasy balance between things. Very uneasy. It almost flies apart, this thing."

Her stint at NASA was a challenge because there was no model for what she was supposed to be doing.

"Not that I was trying to make a kind of scientific artwork or something, " she clarifies. "Because they're already making unbelievable artworks. They're building a staircase to space, out of nanotubes -- you know, electronics that grow like biology. That's Jack-and-the-beanstalk stuff."

These days Anderson is taking an almost opposite tack from such cosmic undertakings, shying away from huge multimedia extravaganzas in favor of more mutable solo pieces, and she relishes the freedom afforded her by making the technological component smaller and much more manageable.

"Stuff that would have taken me trucks to do are now like a briefcase," she says. "I'm running off Macs and a PowerBook, and I'm so happy about that, because my ambitions are to travel very, very light. I'm becoming a shill for technology again; it's so disgusting."

This smaller scale also gives her much more room for the show to improvise and evolve. "I don't have to communicate to 12 technicians that something's going to be dropped or added," she says. "This isn't like theater, and it's not like a concert, either -- it's somewhere between very set and very improvised.

"And the improvised part for me is really crucial because I'm going to be doing this for a couple of months, and this whole idea of personal and artistic freedom is the most important thing to me now."

LAURIE ANDERSON: The performance artists show The End of the Moon will be presented at 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday at Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley. $24-$46. (510) 642-9988,
www.calperfs.berkeley.edu
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